I don't believe it would be irrational to believe that we are alone in the universe, just because of the fact that we haven't found evidence of any of lifeforms, and we don't know FOR SURE what is beyond all we have seen.  When this evidence comes to light, sure.  But also as you said, I believe it is possible that there is some kind of lifeform somewhere else in the universe, with the possibility that the universe is infinite.  Therefore, I do not claim that is rational either (if that is even possible?)  I know for sure I do not believe in green aliens with big eyes, big heads, and skinny bodies, simply because it sounds silly.

The possibility of alien lifeforms is not supernatural, now is it?

Well, as much as I'd like to agree that we've found a planet suitable for life; my skeptical instinct leads me to doubt it. All we know is that the planet is in the goldilocks zone and terrestrial. Other than that, we have not a clue. I believe I read that by the standards they are applying to the criterion, Mars is also suitable for life (which it may very well be for a life form that had evolved on it). But the fact that we have found another planet in the goldilocks zone does demonstrate how unrare they are, considering there are estimated billions of planets in our galaxy alone, and we have found less than 200 of them.

But as far as your little analogy goes; to say that lack of evidence of non-existence should be evidence of possible existence is a pretty poor way of looking at things. We know what conditions it would take for a planet to sustain life, and we can statistically (with a large margin of error, mind you) demonstrate that there are many, many planets out there with those desirable attributes. So, we can safely speculate that since life could arrise on earth, it has likely occurred elsewhere in the universe, somewhere, sometime. Though, given that we cannot, at this point, prove this, we cannot offer it as fact, or assume it to be true. But it is not, by any means, a stretch to consider such things.

But when you want to say that since "we cannot disprove God, he may exist," you are also admitting that the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Fluffy Pink Unicorn, Boogey Man, Santa Claus, and Zeus are all just as plausible.

If you want to believe that some intelligence was behind the universe in the beginning, that's fine (even if I don't agree with you). But when it comes to describing that intelligence, theology is a poor substitute, because it is implausible. And I know you’ve probable heard this a million times, but if you want to invoke your god to explain the universe, it is your job to prove its existence. Otherwise, you better get to disproving all the other gods. As it is now, there is no reason to believe there is a god, only incredulous reckoning.

Edit: I suppose my whole point is that we have good reason, based on what we know about the universe, to suspect there is life out there. But when it comes to God, there is no evidence, only unexplained gaps. 

First, you would be in error to think that atheism is a result of this type of thinking. Absence evidence is an indicator, but no more. Second, there is no relation at all between 'god' and an alien being. I've heard many theists say you can't know there is no god since you haven't looked everywhere. The problem is that no matter where you look you will not find god, given the nature of god. If you look under the right rock you might find an alien, but no matter which rock you look under you will not find god sitting there.

The question of why there are so few planets that are earthlike is rather silly. We have only detected some 200 planets since finding the first. Given that nearly ANY star we look at seems to have planets, the natural extrapolation is that the number of planets in this one galaxy is gigantic. Out of that many, the odds that even 1 of the 200 so far found would be earthlike are worse than winning the god damn powerball.

The limiter to these long odds is that the elements that planets can be composed of is limited by the actual materials that constitute the galaxy, about which we are fairly well versed. So it would really not be very surprising to find that the freqency of earth-like planets is about 1 in 500 (not that we can genuinely infer this number yet, but that if this number were inferred it would not be surprising). 

One of the semi-compelling reason for thinking an earth-type planet would have earth-type life is that life sprang up on this planet, from a geological perspective, AS SOON AS IT COULD. What makes this semi-compelling (rather than compelling) is that we have no other planets with life to judge by...but this is true of all arguments about life on other planets.

Another aspect of having no other life to judge by is that there may be utterly non-earth-like life out there that would be virtually impossible for us to detect since we wouldn't even know how to look for it.

As pointed out, this cannot be used as a metaphor for finding god because god is not like a plant growing under a rock that you can find by lifting the rock.

I doubt that we will never know. It may be hundreds of years from now, but given the accelerating pace of scientific discovery, I think we will eventually make contact.

I disagree that we "probably never will."

Creationism and "old earth" arguments get debunked because there is plenty of evidence to support it, whereas the ONLY support for the creationist viewpoint comes from the bible. I think you could argue that once you've killed creationism, the christian god should be killed as well. I mean, if the very first book of the bible is proven to be a load of junk, then why wouldnt the whole bible be non-factual?

However, since I dont know what "brand" of theism you subscribe to, I would agree with you that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence if we're talking about god in the abstract, energy-field sort of way, but that rarely is the case when theists use this argument. They want to plug in the judeo-christian, or muslim version of god in these arguments, and that is ridiculous.

We have discovered such a small percentage of the number of planets out there that the numerical value would be virtually incomprehensible. The earth has life because numerous factors to facilitate it were present here. While it's an amazing thing to think about, nothing about it is so unbelieveable that there is no choice put to attribute it to a supernatural being.

since it seems the rest of the post is address, i shall address this closing part.

the questions of 'why us' and 'why earth' dont make much logical sense, because if it had been anywhere else in the universe, say on planet marklar, the lifeforms living on there (if they were capable of cognative thought) would ask themselves "why marklar? why us?"  as you can see the questions dont really have alot of merit to them because of this anthropic priniciple. 

the answer to 'why earth' is simply that it is just in the right region to support life long enough for us to come to exist in order to ask the question lol.

sorry if i may have confused you even more.  

I'm guessing that radio signals are the most likely form of first contact.

Of course. I dont understand your point here.

What about The God Theory?

 I haven't read it. Have you?

I did notice that it mentioned zero point fields in the title. Interesting, so god is now demoted to a system in no energy and zero point photons amble around waiting to be caught by an electromagnetic fluctuation in a vacuum.

There you go. There's your testable hypothesis. Let's find a vacuum with no energy, no temperature???, and no influx of material and ask it why we're here.

This just gets lamer and lamer, but I'll read the book if you will and then we can talk about it.

If we refute the use of the word 'theory' in his book then you're going to e-mail him with me. right? 

I love this topic so I'm going to take a kick at it despite coming late to the discussion. 

We can't even say that yet. All we know is that the planet is probably not a gas giant and probably has a surface temperature averaging between 0 and 40 degrees C. There are a million other factors that could make it totally unsuitable for life, for instance, if the surface is molten lava. 

These are two highly different questions. Given the information we have, it is certain that there is life elsewhere in the universe. No other inductive conclusion is possible without adding speculative factors for which we have no evidence. On the other hand, it is equally certain that no aliens have visited us. Look at the following facts:

1. Lightspeed is the maximum speed you can travel in this universe. Going faster than lightspeed requires factors that are speculative at best.

2. Given that lightspeed is the speed limit, evidence of the existence of our civilization has only travelled as far as the oldest microwave transmissions that are powerful enough to leave our atmosphere.  That's a sphere with a radius of about 50 light-years. Again, without assuming speculative technology for which we have no evidence, this represents the maximum distance at which we could be detected.

3. A 50 light-year radius encompasses about 37 stars. 37. Even if there were an alien civilization on 1 out of 100 stars, we would still have around a 2 in 3 chance of not being within range to be detected. Given the likely conditions around most of the stars we see, the ratio of civilizations to stars is probably at least 1 in a million, or possibly much lower. In other words, the chances we have been detected are miniscule.

4. Even if, through some incredible twist of fate, we have been detected, the problem of a visit is at least equally unlikely. Using current technology, if the whole planet pooled resources, we might be able to cobble together a nuclear-powered space ship that could accelerate to near-light speed over several decades. If it hit anything, even a speck of dust, at these speeds, it would be totally destroyed. 

5. The journey, even to the nearest stars, would take decades at least. Unless the aliens were already on the very closest stars (2-5 lightyears away) there has not been time for the trip since the earliest possible time they could have detected our civilization. Repeated trips by different ships with live crews, as described by UFO afficianados, is vanishingly unlikely.

There remains, of course, the fact that in addition to it being certain that there are many civilizations across the galaxy, it is also certain that many of these civilizations are significantly older than our own. Given what we have observed about our own technological progress, we can induce that these civlizations probably have technology far in advance of our own. However, we can also observe that despite our progress, we have never found ways to violate the laws of physics as we have known them for centuries. There is simply no reason to assume that even a very advanced alien race could travel faster than light to visit us or detect our presence.

Wrong. We have strong evidence (namely, our own existence) from which we can induce the overwhelming probability that there are aliens at least somewhere in the universe. 

You will see from my above argument that it is perfectly reasonable to scoff UFO kooks while being totally convinced that there is life elsewhere in the universe.  

The difference between aliens and God is that aliens can be logically induced from the available evidence, while God cannot. We have reasoned that since life exists here, it could also exist in other places with similar conditions and, given the size of the universe, there are almost certainly places where such conditions persist. We have never observed anything that looks or acts like the being depicted in theist god-claims. In fact, for the god-claims to be true, there would have to be serious flaws in our understanding of the world, which doesn't seem likely given that we are able to live in the world using that understanding. Aliens fit easily into what we have observed and what we know. God requires a total rejection of all human logic and science.

There could be planets with alien civilizations as advanced as our own in every single star system we have ever looked at, and we would never know. With present technology, we would not be able to detect ourselves even if we were only as far away as Proxima Centauri. There could be life teeming all over Europa, in our own solar system, and we would not know because we haven't looked closely enough. Hell, there could still be underground life on Mars. We simply do not have enough data to make any statements about the "specialness" of Earth relative to the rest of the galaxy.

Even if it turns out that Earth is one in a billion, or a trillion, it means nothing with regards to the question of God. If Earth were not suitable for life, we wouldn't be here asking the question. The one requires the other. Odds are irrelevant because there is no circumstances under which we could be living on a planet unsuitable for life. You can't be amazed that something impossible hasn't happened. That's why it's impossible. 

First, until there is evidence there is no reason to believe. Second: The idea of aliens passes the law of falsifiability. There is now way to prove god. You can prove that aliens do or do not exist if you have the means to gather enough evidence.

Actually, the speed of light is a limit due to time/length/mass interaction.

Say I travel at high speeds the momentum p

p=mv

is now

p=mv/SQRT(1-v^2/c^2)

as v->c, m->infinity.

Time diliation: as v->c t->0

Length: as v->c length->0

So you would be infinite mass, frozen in time and everything will have a length of 0. A clear condradiciton.

There are a number of theories as to how we could perhaps travel faster than light without actually travelling faster than light in a way that would subject you to relativity. There are no known mechanisms by which to accomplish it, but it is theoretically possible all the same.

The whole intelligent life question is a massive one. Whenever I've done some in depth thought about the subject I tend to come up with the same result: Life is probably a lot more common than people think, and a lot more varied. Considering it took 4.5 billion years for humans to become the dominant life form(yet didn't necessarily have to), civilizations across the universe will be in far different stages of technology than others. Somewhere there's an industrial revolution going on, and somewhere else "people" are crafting their first wheel. Somewhere else "people" are teleporting distances of millions of light years in the span of an instant. And in yet another place you've got "people" harnessing fire for the first time. Considering it's effectively a fluke that humans became the dominant intelligent life form on earth(and how well we get along with each other and other life forms here), there's probably been trillions of species that got close only to be wiped out by natural phenomena or self destruction. Too bad for us if we'd come into power 65 million years ago.

Unfortunately, Cpt_pineapple, taking the reference the beam of light that directly unites the very top of your head with the center of the sun, you are ALREADY travelling at light speed relative to it. So applying your logic, relative to one photon in that beam of light you are frozen in time and have an infinite mass.

If you go towards a street light post at night, then the photons that that light bulb emanates travel at speed c from their starting point, and you travel at speed v (let's say 2-3 miles per hour) towards the street light post. So your speed relative to the photons is actually c+v, which is greater than c.

I posted another question regarding c as the maximum possible speed, but nobody bothered to answer it:

If we have two parallel vacuum tubes, each has a LED at one end, but opposite ends to one another, when the LEDs are switched on, what will be the speed of a photon in one of the tubes, relative to a photon in the other tube?

Similarly, I asked another question which remained unanswered:

We might not be able to go up to light speed, but we might be able to go to a bit faster than half the light speed. So if we have two vehicles, going in opposite directions to one another, at the speed of (c/2)+1 relative to their starting point, what will the speed of each vehicle be relative to the other?

Bump

You'll be waiting a long time for those devices since you can't go as fast as light. Remember what I said about length contraction and time diliation? Those come from the fact that the speed of light (Which cannot be exceeded) is the same for all frames of reference.

Oh, did I mention you cannot travel at the speed of light?

Me? The equations proof it.

As for the theortically possible part, you're getting into string theory and such, that 'warping space' part where you APPEAR to be moving faster than light when you're actually not.

CERN accelerator can only hit about 99% of c.

Funny, because a photon is just a tiny bit of matter, which makes up light. Since you "proved" any object moving at light speed will be of infinite mass, frozen in time. Then why are photons not infinite mass, and frozen in time? A photon is an object also.

Photons can go the speed of light (the speed of photons, right? Since light IS photons) because they have zero mass. Accelerating them to the speed of light therefore does not add mass since there was none to begin with.

The idea of FTL travel through wormholes is not necessarily related to String Theory. The idea was bron following Einstein's Relativity theory, called an Einstein-Rosen bridge. As mentioned this is not actually FTL travel.

Roger Penrose proved mathematically that, in Relativity theory, a black hole collapses to an infinitely dense, infinitely small mass virtually instantaneously. In order for this to be true, The diamter of the collapsing object would have to be shrinking at many times the speed of light, up to the speed of light times infinity. Since the collapsing object is matter, this is clearly a case of matter moving at much greater than the speed of light. Here's the problem: Einstein wasn't right. This is well known. I put it this way to shock, but Einstein being wrong is well known and not really a shock. Einstein's equations are mathematacal idealizations that, while extremely precise (up to nine decimals of accuracy), are not PERFECTLY precise. Something is missing from Relativity theory. The most obvious way we know this is it cannot be reconciled with quantum theory.

The problem of black holes being infinitely dense and infinitely small is yet another that string theory purports to solve. A black hole cannot be smaller than a string, so there would be an absolute limit to the shrinkage and therefor density of a black hole.

Just like to point out a photon does have a mass. It is much less then an electron, but still has a mass. Something massless does not exist. 

Your thinking about relative mass. i.e how much mass would it have if it did based on properties and energy. I would give you the formula, but I lost my Modern Physics book.

Matter anti-matter reactions convert mass to energy.

E=mc^2. Look familar? You can't have infinite energy.

I put the term infinate in quotation marks in case you didn't notice that. But I can very easily show you how E=mc2 proves me right. If m = infinate, then E = infinate.